William Klein: A hunger for life

His style is defined by complex compositions full of energy and an exuberant sense of presentation, informed by his early years as a painter interested in the scale of murals, architecture, and cinema, but also from his joyous way of involving himself in the lives of others. He reached out, collaborating with fashion models, and inviting strangers on the street to pose and play for his camera.

His mentor was no less than the French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker Fernand Lèger, a multihyphenate himself whose intelligence and lack of pretense appealed to Klein who maintained a pragmatic ethos since then. 

Klein’s street savviness came from growing up in New York’s Harlem where he was born in 1926 to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. His family was impoverished after the failure of his father’s clothing business but he was a voracious reader, frequented the Museum of Modern Art, graduated high school at age 14, and took Sociology at City College of New York. He dropped out a year before graduation to join the army, serving in Germany and France. Discharged in 1948, he settled in Paris where he enrolled at Sorbonne and studied painting. He also married Jeanne Florin whom he met on his second day in the city, had a son named Pierre, and stayed together till her death in 2005.

He ended up in photography circuitously, first experimenting in the late 1940s and early 1950s with geometric and abstract painting and sculpture using graphics, moving parts, and shifting lights that were exhibited in Paris, Brussels, and Milan where an architect asked him to create a black and white room divider with rotating panels. As Klein documented the work with a camera, his wife spun the piece, resulting in long-exposure blurs that fascinated the artist who proceeded to his darkroom to produce hundreds of abstract photograms that would appear on covers of magazines, books and records. The photopaper became his new canvas as exemplified by “Moving Diamonds” from 1952.

His breakthrough came in 1954 when he was hired by Alexander Liebermann, the art director of Vogue. Klein felt the fashion studio was “a little bubble of good manners” that he wanted to prick. “Nothing like Klein had happened before. He was like a Fellini, sensing the glamorous and the grotesque,” said Liebermann. For Klein, “In the fashion world, you can never be too absurd.”

It was this irreverence that made his photos stand out: he positioned models on a Manhattan bridge holding mirrors to distort optics. On the Lower East Side, he painted an abandoned barbershop bright pink as a background for impeccably styled white models but, on impulse, pulled in a Black man to sit alongside them. The man was edited out in the final printing.

Klein considered his photos satires of fashion and Vogue itself: “The intention was to show how phony the poses were. But nobody complained. I always made sure you could see the dress.” He was nevertheless valued for subsequent editorials until 1965 for “stylish problem-solving.” 

During this time, he “devoured” New York, frequently shooting with a wide-angle lens to alter and intensify perspective, particularly at close range, then shifting to telephoto lenses to flatten perspective. He tinkered experimentally and intuitively in the darkroom to come up with unusual images that he turned into a book with radical cropping and layouts. “New York is a city of anguish,” Klein said then, and critics indeed found his photos mirroring a “forbidding, violent and disturbing city.” American publishers found it too vulgar. It was released in Paris in 1955 and later in London and Milan, establishing his name as a photographer. 

The following years saw his books on Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo. He had a particular affinity for Rome where he won accolades from film directors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini who invited him to be an assistant. “In Rome, due to the housing shortage, people live more in the streets than at home. The streets are thought of as a theater. At home, nobody sees you; in the street, you have an audience,” Klein observed.

He was always attuned to the performance at hand and captured its vitality. He particularly liked groups and was adept at depicting them, like his photo of a hairdressing school in his Tokyo book where “many things are happening simultaneously in every square inch of the image, a miracle of timing and framing,” says Campany.

Film was a natural progression for him from the early ‘60s to the ‘80s and his first in 1966, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, was, of course, a parody of fashion with an airhead supermodel in the title role and models bleeding from sharp metal dresses. Thirty groundbreaking documentaries include one on the controversial Muhammad Ali as an iconic rebel.

Even in his senior years he still maintained his signature sting with Paris+Klein, a book of photographs that pokes fun at showing chichi ladies eating with plastic forks on paper plates. As always, he used that New York grit as a lens just as his photos of New York would have a Parisian film noir sensuality that he acquired from his second home. It was moving between these two worlds that made him always an outsider, giving his work that alternate perspective and edge which intrigues him to this day.